Building Blocks: Awesome Lego Science Models

There may be no better way to engage kids of all ages in learning about science than with a Lego-based DNA molecule, robot or rocket.

We've scoured the internet for the best, quirkiest, most innovative examples of science-inspired Lego creations. We're featuring some of our favorites here, along with an explanation of the science behind them, including a space shuttle, MRI machine, particle collider and mushroom cloud.

If you have a favorite we've missed, let us know in the comments.

Above:

Curiosity

Chemist Tim Goddard built this Lego model of the Mars Science Laboratory, also known as Curiosity, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's first space flight and the last Shuttle mission. The model was displayed at the National Space Center in the U.K.

NASA launched the nearly 2,000-pound Curiosity rover on Nov. 26, 2011 to scour the red planet for evidence that it can, or did, support life.

"We're not looking for life per se. We're one step before that," said deputy project scientist Ashwin Vasavada of the Mars Science Laboratory. Evidence of water in lakes and rivers suggests Mars may have been "a friendly place for life," he said. With Curiosity, scientists will be looking for water and phosphorus, an element found in cells. They'll also be able to examine Martian hazards, like cosmic rays, solar particles and ultraviolet radiation, which may have killed past life or could be dangerous to humans when we visit the planet.

On on Aug. 6, the self-steering rover will parachute down to Gate Crater, which is "like the layers in the Grand Canyon, a sequence of rocks laid out before you that traverse a lot of geologic history,” planetary scientist John Mustard of Brown University, a 20-year veteran of Mars missions, told Wired Science in July. “Layer by layer, Curiosity’s going to climb from the bottom and up through Martian time.”

Curiosity's pimped out with six-wheel drive, a rocker-bogie suspension drive, a high-tech pair of "eyes" -- its Mast Camera -- and a ChemCam laser that can vaporize and analyze rocks from about 30 feet away. It can crawl over roadblocks 29 inches high and can get up to whopping speeds of about one-twentieth of a mile per hour. But, it'll spend most of its 23-month excursion cruising along at about two hundredths of a mile per hour, when it's not drilling or examining interesting rocks, that is.

Scientists hope Curiosity will gather evidence of how Mars morphed from a possibly wet, life-friendly place to a dry, cold inhospitable planet.

"If we have a detailed record of that whole evolution, that would be a huge success," Vasavada said.

Genetic Code

Nannan Zhang built this DNA sculpture out of Lego bionicle claws as a gift to geneticist Gary Stormo, with whom Zhang did genetics research for this undergraduate thesis.

Deoxyrybonucleic acid, better known by its street name DNA, has been called (pun intended) life's building block.

The spiral ladder-shaped molecule holds our most personal information: the blueprints that build the proteins that make up our cells, tissues and organs. There may be a stretch of DNA with your name on it.

DNA can be used against you in a court of law. It can also tell you who's your daddy.

More than a decade ago, scientists first sequenced the human genome, an endeavor that cost $2.7 billion to complete. In January, Life Technologies, a biotechnology company, announced they could sequence an entire genome in about a day for less than $1,000.

Although scientists can tell you your genetic alphabet -- the approximately three billion A's, T's, G's and C's that make up your DNA -- they're still trying to understand what it all means. So far, they’ve mostly focused on genes, the parts of the code that spell out how to build proteins. But genes only make up about 1.5 percent of the genome. Scientists still don’t fully understand what our DNA’s (almost) 99 percent is doing.

Regulatory sequences, for example, help determine when genes are turned on or off. Though they don't code for proteins, they control what genes are used in what context, which is important for development, says bioinformatician Jim Kent of the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Anatomy Lab

Nannan Zhang, who's been featured in Wired previously for his post-apocalyptic Lego creation, built the anatomy classroom as a gift to his anatomy professors at UT Southwestern Medical School. The first-year medical school student tried to make the Lego version of his anatomy lab as realistic as possible by including its instructors (the anatomists), blackboards, overhead lamps, radiographs, and metallic cadaver tanks, which (in real life) have a lever that retracts the diseased bodies into a holding chamber.

But the MiniFigs don't bear any resemblance to the real anatomists. "They don't give any idea how old we are," human anatomy course director Barry Botterman quipped.

Anatomy is unique among medical school classes because students "are really seeing their first patient," Botterman said. "Probably they'll spend more time with that cadaver than they will any of the patients they'll see in the future. They get to know that cadaver pretty well."

With it, students not only learn about the structure of the human body, but they also get to see how different diseases affect it. At UT, there are roughly 60 cadavers per 240 students. Among the cadavers they study, students may get to see how cancer and kidney disease affect the body. In total, they spend about 180 hours looking closely at the body's heart, veins, arteries, lungs, joints, tendons, tissues and other organs.

They start off with the muscles of the back, hands and arms. They then move up toward the head, which Zhang says is probably the most complicated area to dissect because of its vast number of nerves, blood vessels and small muscles. After the head, the students course down the body until they reach the toes.

"Seeing what everything you learn about in textbooks looks like in real life -- that's something I'll never forget," Zhang said.

Antikythera Mechanism

Andrew Carol built this working Lego-version of the ancient Antikythera Mechanism.

Discovered in the early 1900s by a group of underwater sponge divers, the real Antikythera mechanism may be the world's oldest analog computer. The roughly 2,000-year-old Babylonian device may have displayed the motions of the sun, moon and five planets and accurately predicted eclipses and other celestial events.

The National Archeological Museum in Athens houses what's left of the Antikythera Mechanism.

The Kidney

Medical illustrator Maya Shoemaker built this kidney model after she was dubbed "kidney" for dressing up like the bean-shaped organ for Halloween.

"I happen to love the organ for its shape and cuteness," she wrote in an e-mail. "The kidney seemed like a good option for my first anatomical Lego study because of the level of detail needed to show off the parts -- it held up well at a small resolution of bricks."

The kidney removes waste products and excess water. It balances the body's electrolytes and produces hormones that affect blood pressure and the production of red blood cells and vitamin D, which is important for healthy bones. Without your two kidneys, you'd die.

Each one is about the size of a fist and weighs between four and six ounces, depending on your gender.

Kidneys have about 1 million tiny filters called nephrons, which rid the blood of excess ions (sodium, potassium, chloride), glucose and small proteins. These organs filter about 50 gallons of fluid each day. Most is reabsorbed into the body, while the rest leaves as urine.

Chronic kidney disease is a serious health issue: 26 million Americans have kidney disease, according to the National Kidney Foundation. And last year, surgeons performed more than 15,000 kidney transplants in the U.S., according the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network. People with kidney disease have a higher risk of high blood pressure and heart disease.

Image: Maya Shoemaker.

Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Raymond Bull says he started putting together just the shell of this model and realized he could build an entire MRI machine around it. He's not a scientist, but he's always been interested in science and science fiction, he says.

MRI, or magnetic resonance imaging, has been around since Dr. Raymond Damanian built Indominatable, the first scanner, in the late 1970s. Since then, the technology has become quite common in clinical and research settings. Chances are you know someone who's been in one of these giant contraptions.

Inside the bore, the donut-shaped cylinder that houses the MRI machine's superconducting magnet, hydrogen reacts to the magnet's magnetic field. Normally hydrogen atoms spin in random directions, creating a tiny magnetic field of their own. (Scientists focus on hydrogen because it's so abundant in cells.) The MRI's magnetic field is much stronger, causing them to shift. About half align with the magnetic field, and about half in the opposite direction. But not every atom cancels each other out. A few more line up with the magnetic field because this requires less energy.

When the MRI's radio transceiver sends out radio waves tuned to hydrogen, these unmatched atoms absorb energy and flip. Atoms flip back and release energy when the radio waves are turned off. The MRI scanner "reads" that energy, and, using math, coverts the signal into an image of your stomach, lungs, brain, tendons, etc.

"It's one of the few techniques that produces such exquisite images of the soft tissues in the body," said Joseph Hornak, who directs the Rochester Institute of Technology's Magnetic Resonance Laboratory.

With MRI, doctors can take high-resolution pictures of your muscles without having to cut you open. The images can help them diagnose multiple sclerosis, tendonitis, stroke and cancer. MRI can also be used to image flowing blood and to study brain function. It's even been used assess the quality of wine and wine grapes and to study tarantulas' heartbeats.

In hospitals, MRI magnets tend to be around three tesla or 30,000 gauss, the units for measuring magnetic strength. (The Earth's magnetic field, by comparison, is about 0.5 gauss.) But researchers use 7-tesla machines because stronger magnets tend to produce higher-quality images.

Some worry these strong magnetic fields could be harmful, but Hornak says the real danger stems from not being careful around an MRI machine. Metal objects like keys, pens, scissors and jewelry can become deadly projectiles when they get pulled into the magnet, Hornak says.

Some people, however, have reported feeling dizzy in stronger, research-grade MRI machines. The magnetic field might affect the endolymph, or fluid, in the semicircular canals, structures in the inner ear involved in balance, according to a study in the October issue of Current Biology.

The magnetic field slightly tugs at this fluid, which deflects the ear's tiny motion sensors. This deflection can make people feel like they're on a very slow merry-go-round, says engineer and lead author Dale Roberts of Johns Hopkins University.

But most people getting an MRI won't ever feel this because the force produced by magnets used in clinical settings is so weak. The force your ear feels when you move your head, for example, is much stronger. For now, the implications of Roberts' findings might be more pertinent to scientists studying the brain than to patients getting an MRI.

"What makes it very important (even more so than the fact that MRI can make you dizzy) is that MRI has become a widespread tool to study brain function. This study shows that MRI may itself actually be affecting the brain function we are trying to measure," wrote neurologist Mark Walker of Case Western University in an e-mail.

Bombs & Mushroom Clouds

Bruce Lowell based his Lego mushroom cloud (above) on a Lego sphere he built about 10 years ago, popularly known as the Lowell sphere. (He didn't call it that, he says.)

While making a Lego doughnut, he decided to plug the doughnut hole, and when he did that, "it looked enough like a mushroom cloud to make a full one," he wrote in an e-mail. "I'm a really big fan of the television show 24 which had a few nuclear explosions in its run, so I'm sure the idea was hanging around in my subconscious waiting to come out."

Nuclear weapons come in several explosive varieties, including fusion and fission bombs. Hiroshima's "Little Boy" and Nagazaki's "Fat Man," perhaps the most famous bombs in history, were both fission bombs.

Nuclear fission happens when an atom splits in two. As it fisses, it also spits out neutrons and gamma rays, a type of nuclear radiation. Fusion happens when two atoms merge to form a bigger one. (The sun makes helium by melding two hydrogen atoms together.) Both reactions release tremendous amounts of energy.

When "Little Boy" and "Fat Man" exploded in 1945, they killed thousands of people as they created frantic plumes of dust and water droplets. Mushroom-shaped clouds also form during volcanic eruptions, other types of strong explosions, and even when peat moss release their spores.

For example, when a bomb explodes, it forms a hot, buoyant gas bubble, or fireball, that rises and expands quickly, picking up dust and debris along the way to form the stem. As it expands, it creates a shock wave.

The hot bubble forms a rolling flow of hot material rising in the center, which then rolls down at the edges to form the mushroom cap, says Dave Dearborn of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

The cloud's size and height depends on the explosion's strength. These clouds can rise at speeds of about 300 mph and can change color from red brown to white as water condenses.

Fire

For artist Cole Blaq, fire symbolizes inspiration because its energy "shines far and releases heat. This is the energy that keeps me moving," he wrote in an e-mail.

Fire is a chemical reaction between oxygen and a fuel, like gasoline, alcohol or wood, that's heated to its ignition temperature. As the fuel heats up, it releases volatile gases that then react with oxygen and start burning. Fires are self-perpetuating because the heat they give off kindles the chemical reaction between oxygen and the fuel, keeping it going. Without oxygen, heat or fuel, fires die. For example, splashing water on a flame lowers the temperature.

Fires get a bad reputation for destroying homes and killing people. But not all fire is bad. In forests, fires help clear dead brush and some trees need fire to help them release their seeds.

Space Shuttle

Ed Diment, Annie Diment and their colleagues, OptimalControl and Euphonica, built this 1:37 scale model of Space Shuttle Discovery for display at the National Space Center in Leicester, U.K. The model shows the shuttle's external tank and two solid rocket boosters.

NASA's space shuttle program launched on April 12, 1981 as Shuttle Columbia took off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The shuttle program's spacecraft were the first reusable space-planes in orbit, and astronauts took the first space walk during Shuttle Columbia.

For astronauts, weightlessness and the tight living conditions were among the biggest challenges.

While in orbit, astronauts are in a constant free fall around Earth. They can't sit, pour a glass of water or use the bathroom the way you would at home.

And then there's the tight living quarters. "It's like a family trip and never getting out of the Winnebago for six months," Bursch said.

During its 30-year run, the program carried astronauts to space; put satellites into orbit; recovered and repaired satellites; and helped build the International Space Station, the largest structure in space. The shuttles orbited the Earth almost 21,000 times and spent more than 1,320 days in space.

The five spacecraft, Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Endeavor and Atlantis, flew a total of 135 missions between 1981 and July 21, 2011, when Atlantis completed the program's final mission after landing at Kennedy Space Center.

The total cost of the shuttle program was $113.7 billion (not adjusted for inflation).

Space Rockets

Neil Armstrong traveled to the moon with the help of a Saturn V, a type of rocket used in the 1960s and 1970s for the Apollo missions. These rockets were about 360 feet tall, or taller than the Statue of Liberty, and weighed the equivalent of about 400 elephants.

Although many people associate rockets with space, the word rocket can refer to any engine or to a vehicle that uses an engine. NASA has used rockets to launch astronauts into space, put satellites into orbit, and send spacecraft to the moon and other planets.

ATLAS Detector

ATLAS is a roughly 150-foot long, 7,000-ton particle detector at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. CERN scientists are using ATLAS to study the "particle zoo," which includes fundamental particles like quarks, muons and neutrinos, and the elusive Higgs boson. They're also hoping they might discover new, exotic ones, like squarks, sleptons or gluinos.

"Just the same way an atom is built as a core and electrons, the particles in the core are build on something too," physicist Sascha Mehlhase said.

So they're accelerating protons, positively charged atomic particles, and then they colliding them. When these subatomic particles collide, they can create new ones.

"We have an equation by Mr. Albert Einstein, E=mc2, that says if you have a lot of energy, that can be converted into a new particle, a new mass," Mehlhase said. Some of these particles decay within fractions of a second, while they're still inside the beam pipe where they collided. So ATLAS measures the traces these particles leave behind, and then scientists use the signals to deduce what particles the collision created.

Mehlhase built the Lego ATLAS model to help spark interest in particle physics in people visiting the Neils Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, where he works. Plus, building a replica out of the Danish toy bricks seemed appropriate.

He hopes students will build Lego ATLAS models of their own so they can learn what the detector does through putting it together. For example, as they're building the large, white circular outer wheels, an instructor would tell them these are the muon chambers, which detect muons, negatively charged particles that are slightly heavier than electrons.

"A muon is like the big brother of the electron," Mehlhase said.

Unlike other particles, muons don't lose much energy as they move through the inner layers of the detector, so scientists assume they are the only particles able to make it this far out from the center.

Robotic Limb

Can your Legos hold a bottle or pour water out of a cup? Max Shepherd’s can.

The UNC biomedical engineering major build a robotic Lego arm that mimics a human arm and hand’s range of motion. He's been building models since he was 10 years old. His Lego limb can flex and spread its fingers, curl its thumb, make a fist, rotate its wrist, and in case you’re wondering, yes it can flip people off.

“But I’m not going to put that in the video,” Shepherd said.

The model is built around the constraints of Legos, so it's not meant to function as a prosthetic, but it does showcase how intricate movement can be, Shepherd says. Some fans have told him they’d never thought about how mechanically complex human hands and arms were until seeing his Lego version.

The hand is one of the most intricate parts of the body. Our fingertips have hundreds of nerve endings that feed back information about the environment, like pressure and temperature, back to the brain. Part of the challenge in developing prosthetics is building a neural-prosthetic interface to re-establish these connections after they've been severed due to amputation. New research suggests scientists are getting closer to overcoming this barrier.

Bones

Artist Cole Blaq's model of a spine, called Tuff to the Bones (above), is meant to depict "anatomy and the perception of genetic science from a view of a simple person," he wrote in an e-mail.

The title could also imply resilience.

Scientists who study back pain must have plenty of that because studying back pain is well ... a pain. It's complicated and experts haven't quite figured out what causes it.

But William Marras, the director of Ohio State University's Biodynamics Laboratory, is developing a personalized, "dynamic MRI," which images how human spines move and react in different scenarios like lifting a box, pushing a cart, twisting or bending. The model is based on measurements taken from individual patients as they move.

The technology could help researchers understand the root causes of back pain, which afflicts up to 80 percent of people at least once in their lives.

Marras and his staff measure the patient's body. They stick electrodes on the patient's torso and place a motion-sensitive device around their lower back. They put markers on a patient's joints to figure out how their arms and legs move. When a patient walks or raises his arms, electrodes and sensors record those movements.

The researchers also use MRIs and CT scans to give them an accurate picture of the patient's tissues and bones. They integrate all the data and construct a 3-dimensional model of the spine. The model can give them insights into how specific or repetitive movements cause muscle stress. They can then use that information to advice companies on how to design their workplace to minimize injury or surgeons on the best course of treatment for patients.

Some of Marras' research is focused on preventing work-related injuries in the car industry, so he brings workers into the lab, where they can simulate the production process with cars and tools they'd have at the factory. If he's assessing a patient considering surgery, he'll have him perform everyday activities like bending, twisting and lifting. Marras and his staff also get feedback from the patient about how he/she is feeling. Researchers who use cadaver spines or computer-based models don't get that information.

"You can make all your mistakes on a computer before going and trying it out on a person," he said.

For years, researchers have studied back pain generally, asking patients if they're doing too much heavy lifting, whether back pain runs in their family, or if they're sitting in front of a computer for too long, Marras says. They've relied on computer models or cadaver spines to study how the spine reacts to stress and pressure.

These models can simulate daily activities, provided researchers know what muscles are involved, says David Moody, who developed a spine simulator as part of a collaboration at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of California, San Francisco to test how muscle strain and posture contribute to back pain. The problem is that researchers often lack this information.

Plus, "movement is the key to life," Marras said. "A lot of these models that are out there don't really assess what happens when people move," which could be a recipe for misunderstanding what's really happening, he said.

Despite its benefits, there's still a long way to go before Marras' system is widely available. He didn't say how much the procedure cost, but he did say it wasn't cheap. Plus, the modeling takes three to four people about a month to complete. He hopes he'll be able to cut that time down significantly over the next few years so the technique can be used more routinely.

Until then, the recommendations he's able to make are still based on generalizations based on a few people's personalized scans, in a way that's similar -- though in Marras' opinion superior -- to working with a robotic setup and cadaver spines, which are a scarce resource. The end goal of both approaches, however, is the same: to design personalized treatments.

"If I can make detailed models of a handful of people and say, 'Ah ha!' When people do this, this is what happens to the spine, then I can find more general ways to fit that in to a much larger population and come up with much stronger relationships. You'll know what you're talking about as opposed to just having fuzzy ideas as to what the cause and effect is," Marras said.

Genetic Engineering

Artist Cole Blaq thinks of his creation, Decode, as a merging of "religion, science, plastic, graffiti, [and] art into one thing -- my expression," he wrote in an email. It's like a "search for the absolute, the search for truth."

Through genetic engineering, scientists are searching for ways to introduce, or delete, traits by manipulating an organism's genetic code. In 2006, MIT bioengineers made E. coli, which usually give off a putrid stench, smell like bananas. They inserted genes that allowed the bacteria to make isoamyl acetate, a chemical behind the ripe-banana scent. In 2009, Japanese scientists released Applause, the world's first blue rose. These roses make delphinidin, a pigment common in blue flowers, but not typically found in roses.

Scientists are also using genetic engineering to fight diseases like malaria and dengue. They're creating mosquitoes that transmit these diseases less efficiently. They hope these mosquitoes will then breed with native populations and pass along the genes that make them less infectious. But there are ethical concerns with using genetically modified organisms as their effects on native populations aren't fully clear.

Periodic Table

The periodic table organizes elements, substances made up of one type of atom, according to their properties and behavior. For example, the noble gases -- helium, neon, argon, krypton and xenon, are listed together as group 18. They are odorless, colorless gases that aren't very reactive.

Elements are arranged from left to right based on atomic number, which refers to the number of protons an element has. Hydrogen, the number 1 element, only has one proton. Carbon has six, and xenon has 86. Typically, the higher the atomic number, the heavier an atom is.

Gorillas

Barbara J. Chin snapped this photo of Lego gorillas at the Bronx Zoo in New York in July 2011. The brick-based primates were part of a Lego Zoofari Expedition featuring animals that are part Wildlife Conservation Society's preservation efforts.

Gorillas are the largest living primates, a group that include monkeys, lemurs, orangutans, chimpanzees and humans. Scientists can identify them by taking close-ups of their noses because no two gorillas have the same one. Males can be up to 6 feet tall and weigh more 200 pounds. Females are smaller: They can be about 5 feet tall and weight around 200 pounds. In the wild, gorillas live around 35 years, but up to 50 in captivity.

These mostly herbivorous animals live in central Africa. Gorilla gorilla live in lowland tropical rain forests, while Gorilla berengei live at higher altitudes in mountain slopes, bamboo forests and rain forests.

Gorillas live in troops of up to 30. The alpha male, the silverback, is the group's big boss. He helps protect his clan and decides where the group will hunt and move to each day.

These hairy animals don't have predators, but humans hunt them for meat, including their hands and heads, which is sold as part of the illegal bushmeat trade.

"This has led to the decimation of wild gorillas," said Billy Karesh, the executive vice president of EcoHealth Alliance. "Many human outbreaks of [Ebola hemorrhagic fever] have been traced back to hunters killing infected gorillas."